Greenstorm's Journal

The subject of death planning came up today. Someone mentioned they'd paid for their cremation, had a plan, and also had their urn already, though the urn made them uncomfortable to see in their closet.

I don't like the idea of cremation particularly but I love the idea of making my own urn. I wouldn't mind putting it on a north shelf altery thing in my livingroom. It does occur to me, though, that I don't think there's anyone who would want a container of my ashes.

Nor, really, does my body belong resting in the built environment.

But I might make myself a wheat urn anyhow. The prototyping is just seed jars, right? My favourite potter tutorial guy just put out a tutorial on making lidded jars.

The first of the mass graves of children was officially excavated in Canada this week.

Everywhere people are talking about the 215 children found in that grave, from age 3 on up. Everywhere they are grieving and honouring.

I've always lived a little in the future. Working in forestry, on the landbase with the Indigenous Nations whose children these are, I've had to learn about our history with these Nations both professionally and personally. I live in a town that's very Indigenous, maybe 30-40% of the folks in town depending on how you look at it?

And so I know that 215 is the tip of a very large iceberg.

Canada's policy of removing children and sending them to these residential schools lasted a very long time. A very high percentage of these children died, the figure I've heard most recently was around 25%. 1 in 4. The abuse in these schools was horrific so it's not just that these kids died. These kids died far from home while enduring the kind of tortures Christians describe in their hell. They were buried by their surviving siblings and friends and other fellow children who then went home and, having experienced only institutional abuse sometimes for a couple generations, tried to parent their children.

Mourning these 215 children, seeing them, is a release. They are loved in death, as they were no doubt loved at a distance by powerless parents in life. But there are so many to come, so many, so many.

I was abused a little as a kid, not enough to really grasp the enormity of this but enough to know that with enough support I could come back from it and find love and connection and trust in the world again. The Nations as a whole are doing this, their people slowly knitting themselves back towards wholeness.

I had that chance so I know what it would have meant to not have it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that no one in the world would save me, that there were people cruel enough to make that happen and no kindness was powerful enough to stop it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that the balance of the world was against me.

None of this is new. The exact numbers aren't known because when too many kids at these schools started dying Canada stopped keeping count. The Catholics who ran the schools may have numbers but they aren't telling. The official, likely very low numbers, are in the thousands. This has been sitting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission website since 2015, along with some calls to action to try and fix things (this is the "reconciliation" Canada talks about). I had to learn about it in a couple different places in school, and in communities with any reasonable sized First Nation population it's just known; many of these folks went to the schools and basically all their parents did, after all.

But there's something about seeing this exact number going around, 215, that's so hard for me. Maybe it's the press of the rest of them, waiting.

There's nothing about this that was ok. Genocide, knowledge loss, family separation, abuse, death, removing people from their ecosystems: none of it was ok.

This week I am carrying grief for the as-yet-uncounted dead.

It's bigger than I am.

Lynx got one more goose. Got the lynx.

Beneath that coat it was the skinniest animal I'd touched. It was starving, probably why it was coming by all hours of the day and night.

I am sad for my goose, she was a brave pilgrim girl.

I am sad the lynx had to be killed.

And I'm sad the poor kitten spent is last weeks starving and desperate.

Some times are hard.

I've just finished scalding and gutting a suckling pig. She was born Sept 29 so that puts her at just shy of 7 weeks. She's a nice size for roasting and the scalding went pretty ok; it would have done really easily in a mechanical plucker I think. She had a rectal prolapse that I couldn't get to go back inside her; I saw it this morning and brought her in (she seemed cold) to warm up and in the hopes that I could fix it. I could not. So maybe this is my first entirely solo pig kill; I used the little captive bolt stunner.

The little ones have been somewhat constipated, which is probably the root cause of this. I've been trying to get them to drink water but they just will not. At this point I'm mixing enough water with their grains to just be a very very wet soup. Maybe I should try bringing them hot water?

This girl was the daughter of Black Chunk, who was herself born here. She has three uncastrated male siblings that will become their own roasters in mid-December, but I'm getting them done professionally.

It's getting dark out there now - 4:30 is dusk with daylight savings time - and the pigs are frolicking all over, chasing each other and having zoomies. I think someone might be in heat, and I think Rapunzel might be pregnant. I have Penny on my calendar as due on American Thanksgiving but she's not looking super round. I guess we will see.

Tucker reminded me that even though things are getting better for me, I told myself I still want to downsize the farm. And I do. I cannot decide between keeping Baby and keeping Oak though.

My feelings about this all perhaps belong in a different post, written once I have a cup of tea.

So I'm death aspected. What this means isn't that I want everything to immediately die, or that I hate living things, or that I wander around wearing black and making nihilistic statements.

What this means is that I know every molecule in my body has been through more organisms than I can ever imagine, all of which have died.

What this means is that death is a balance, the weight on the other side of the scales without which they fall apart. It's the feeling of one hand held in another with life.

Death is the place from which all nourishment comes, and it's the limiter of all pain and disaster. It's the boundary that protects life inside it, even though setting boundaries can feel hard and come with loss and grief.

What this means is that I'm aware of death in a way that most of our society, viewing it as an outrage to be erased and forgotten, doesn't want to be. What this means is I'm aware death needs to be honoured with ritual and with thought and integration into our philosophies.

What this means is that I believe in grief. Death exists, loss exists. They are real, not some temporarily inconvenient aspect of the world that science or God and the right behaviour can erase. And because they are such real forces in our lives we will always be exposed to grief. It's a fertile place full of strong and sometimes unpredictable energy.

I have so many mourning rituals, and so many grief rituals. The normal pagan ones tend not to stand for me. Instead I write, I pour the energy into the land, I cry, I cherish what is lost, I sing loudly and cry in cars and in public.

People die every day. They die in cars, they choose death, their bodies decide to take them back to the earth. We adjust to that.

This particular end times seems like we may get a big dying, a big loss of the society we knew, and a big grief.

This grief is-- more than 50% of the pine trees died in the last mountain pine beetle epidemic. White-nose disease took bat populations down unimaginably. Few American chestnuts are left. Once there were so few Canada geese we thought they'd go extinct.

The fact that thriving populations get lowered by natural factors doesn't reduce the grief of it. Even if it's inevitable, even if it needs to happen, the grief is real. Our planet has had a lot of these kinds of grief lately.

And now here we are. Humans, looking something not so extreme in the face. And it's still a big grief.

I'm death aspected. The coming grief feels like weight, like gravity, but not like an outrage. It feels like it will need a container, made by humans, to live with the grief and give it meaning and solace.

I do hope we are up to the task.

In 2013 I think? 2012? I was volunteering at Urban Digs farm near Vancouver. They were a little peri-urban place that did mixed ag: field crops and meat. I was living in New West. I was going to forestry tech school in the evenings, working & volunteering during the day -- or was this after I finished that first round of school?

Anyhow, the person who ran the farm brought home some rabbits from auction and one of them was too friendly to eat (she had a bunch of meat rabbits). That rabbit was Taoshi, who seemed a lot like an English Spot. I was offered the rabbit, she came home with me, and I needed to get her a friend. Urban Digs offered me my choice of any of their litters.

The litter I selected from was a Flemish Giant x New Zealand, maybe not a pure 50-50 cross but that's what went into it. Before the babies opened their eyes there was one that was just the right one: the right colour, the right one. I remember what she looked like nestled in her mom's fur, still mostly pink, a perfect sunshine caramel rather than a white rabbit or a darker agouti.

When she was old enough I took her home to Taoshi and they... didn't really get along. Taoshi annoyed Mella for being too active, Mella annoyed Taoshi for being too territorial and boring. They fought a bunch. Mella turned out to very much take after Flemish Giants in size and bone structure. She was a big bony girl with very particular ideas.

They lived together in a puppy pen in my livingroom for the most part: they could see everything that was going on and take part if they wanted. They came out for free time. Mella didn't want me to touch her at first so Taoshi got most of the physical attention, though I talked to both of them. Mel was the smart one; when I fed them in the morning she realized that if she woke me up earlier she'd get fed earlier and she'd alarm-stomp a little earlier each day. I eventually switched to feeding them in the evening.

She would allow me to pet her nose, though, and in time when she realized I was no longer trying to pick her up she'd start coming up to me, facing me and touching her chin to the floor to indicate that it was time to pet her.

When I was in my car accident Taoshi ran away and Mella stayed. She came to the hospital with me, then home to the room I was renting as I got through university. At this point her pen was in my bedroom, but I left it open often. I had my mattress on the floor at that time and she'd come snuggle with me in bed. It was a dark, hard time and she absolutely got me through it. I think she was having a hard time too, honestly. Anyhow, we made it through together. She got spayed around this time and got a little easier to handle but she definitely had her preferences and made no bones about her boundaries.

I suppose that was when we really started to bond.

After the accident I knew she needed a rabbit friend so I took her speed-dating. Rabbits are particular about their friends and rabbit speed dating is a thing that really exists! The person at the rabbit rescue suggested she'd be better off as an only rabbit after she ignored/lunged at something like fifteen potential friends in a row.

The rescue was a failure but by chance there was a litter of bunnies at the local spca. I think there were 10 babies in the litter? Anyhow, I brought her in and she ignored all the babies except one: Juniper cuddled with her a little or licked her ears. So, Juniper came home (Juniper's brother Odin came home too, to keep the young one company in case Mella didn't want to play but the baby did). Odin had - maybe neurological issues? and only lived a couple years. Juniper got along so well with Mella, and they snuggled and groomed each other and slept together and were always in carriers together until yesterday. June would always lick Mella's enormous sail ears when she asked.

She had always had a bit of a splay leg in the front. Her energy level definitely wound down over time and she was pretty mellow to begin with. A couple months ago her back end stopped functioning as well and she was having trouble getting into and out of the litter box. A couple times she got caught over the edge and I helped her in or out. Last week she couldn't get in or out anymore and was just lying by the water; I put her in the soft hay-lined litterbox. She didn't seem to have control of her front paws either and I brought her little bowls of water several times a day and put food right in front of her. She ate and drank fine and her bowls were working but she couldn't move away from the pile of poop, or from the urine that soaked her back. I bathed her a couple times but rabbit fur doesn't dry that quickly and I was worried.

It was clear after a few days that she wasn't regaining any movement. She was still always happy to see me (by this time in our relationship she was happy to see me, had been really ever since the accident). She drank and ate and got treats. But it was time.

Yesterday I put Mella and June into the carrier together for the last time. Tucker drove me to the vet, since I didn't trust myself to drive. She stayed in the carrier, getting petted and being with June, until the first sedative kicked in. I was petting her so much that she licked me in reciprocal grooming which she seldom did to humans. Then she got brought up to the table and lay in the curve of my arm on a blanket. Sleepy as she was she still resisted the butterfly needle being put into the vein in her ear and she took a whole lot of sedative. Very slowly she relaxed. Even with all that in her she resisted another needleful going into her ear several minutes later. She kept breathing for a long time. I petted her and thanked her.

She had given me her whole life.

You can never repay or be worthy of a thing like that.

Eventually her heart stopped beating. There was blood from her ear on my hand. I kissed her forehead where she liked being petted and put my head down in rabbit language for "please pet me" but of course she didn't move.

I keep remembering her as a little baby in her mother's nest.

She had been with me her whole life.

She never did compromise for me. All my animals that I have now, they pretty much adore me and will do things to seek my attention and praise. Mella just went on being herself the whole time.

I wish I could have known what she thought about things better.

I love her very much.

Goodbye, Mella.

So I've always been death-aspected. Naming this about myself is one of the more powerful things that's happened to me. For me this means I have a bone-deep intrinsic understanding of the fitness and importance of death. I know that it is inevitable. I think the cycle of death/birth is beautiful and compelling, and not just the birth part. Death is one part of the meaning of everything. It's a time to view, honour, and create an organism's meaning.

This does not mean I don't feel grief when things die, nor does it mean I want to hurry my own death along. It may even mean I'm more able to experience my grief because I'm not trying to erase the presence of the death.

Our society tends to view death as meaningless or as a punishment. It wants to hide death as much as possible. That becomes increasingly evident when I wander around existing. Some folks view the existence of death as an affront, and some feel like death voids all the meaning of everything. I'm glad I'm not those folks. I value my understanding of the cycle.

Aaaaaaaand... there's a huge shortage of abbatoirs in the interior of BC. Lots of folks can't get appropriate poultry slaughtered (especially waterfowl) because there are not enough licensed facilities for them, and because what facilities exist are so widely spaced. One of the biggest things anyone could do to promote waterfowl breeds would be to open an abbatoir that serviced them somewhere around Prince George/Williams Lake.

In my mind this is one of the things I'll retire to: likely not enough work to be a full-time or well-paying business, but providing a service.

It seems like a good fit.

When I was first in this town I got my coworkers celebrating solstice. Stay up all night, wine, meat on a stick over the fire, greet the dawn across the lake. When I was gone they carried on doing it without me.

Last year I didn't attend; I was in my new home I think.

This year my land reminds me that I'm death-aspected, and it's helping me count down the days. There had been so much life here, such a long steady relentless ramp up of increasing living matter from the last snow through the first buds on the aspens and birds nesting and nearly a hundred new birds arriving and the sorrel growing and the grass coming up and everything just exploding into being alive.

Life is built on death. I know this in my bones. The normative world wants to believe that death is only old things but of course it is not. An excess of life and then death at all stages is the engine that drives the world; it drives selection and fitness and speciation. This is the week that counts down to solstice. I expect death in the fall but it's found me here, at the height of the sun's energy, when I had somehow almost forgotten it wasn't all under my control.

First I lost an eggbound hen on Monday. I'd had one previous prolapsed duck I had to cull, this one had the egg break inside her and sepsis set in. Next day my first livestock losses to wildlife today. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and maybe eight very rare breed hatchery chicks to enhance the genetics of my flock were taken by what appears to be a family of ravens teaching its young to hunt. Ravens come in the windstorms and there was the mother of all windstorms that day. Even the super tiny ducklings were all fine; anything with a mother to protect them, or that moved in a close herd like the hatchery ducklings. The hatchery chicks were five weeks old at this point, they tended to scatter rather than flock, and they had neither a mother hen nor a watchful rooster to adopt them. The next day I lost a piglet, my first piglet loss. He'd been doing poorly and had an injury to his face, I think maybe from the ravens when he was sleeping? But he held in there for a couple weeks and then one day he just did not make it. That was Wednesday. Now it's Thursday. I found the neighbours' well-loved cat on the road, hit, in front of their house. The didn't answer the phone so I wrapped him in my coat and took him up the driveway. They had just got him a couple months ago to replace one of their old cats who had died.

Tomorrow is Friday. I will work from home, take breaks, and bury things. I will plant trees and fence the trees clear of the geese.

Then I will go to the fire at my boss' place and bring wine and bloody meat and be among humans.

On the weekend I'll mulch and give the pigs a new field of grass and go for a walk by the lake. I'll talk to Josh and hold and be held by Tucker. I'll give my grief to the ground and see what grows there.

With my land behind me I feel like a conduit for grief now, like the component that lends meaning to these deaths so they don't flow unremarked back into the soil. Grief doesn't make me question my fitness for my role, though it makes me want to improve my systems. It doesn't get tangled up and corrosive. It just... hurts, and it's supposed to, and that's ok.

I'm definitely apprehensive about tomorrow though.

At this time last year I got my first muscovy "ducks" (which are not actually ducks in the same way coastal redcedars are "thuja" and not "cedrus" or rose of sharon isn't a rose- their common name is a legacy of our tendency to reuse colonial names instead of using new names for new species). There were five of them, all female: Lilac, Silver, Cream, Chocolate, and Chocolate II. Later in the year my family brought me up a drake from the coast ("Drake") and the little flock was completed.

We can discuss how I name my animals some other time.

The muscovies overwintered in a little shed I modified out of a lean-to. The girls had relatively rough feathers; they hadn't had water to bathe in where they came from, just drinking water. Bathing encourages their waterproofing gland and makes them sleek and weather resistant. I didn't let them out because I wasn't certain they'd stay, but I did give them a very small outdoor yard that had a tub of water to bathe in. They bathed a lot, and pooped a lot, to the point where I needed to chip ice-shit mixture away from their tub to empty it.

In the spring Chocolate started sitting on a nest of eggs even before the snow was gone. She hatched 6 adorable ducklings and mothered them well. Lilac and Chocolate II hatched, and Chocolate II stole the babies, taking care of a total of 18 little ones. They were also adorable. As the weather warmed the Silver and Cream also sat but with less success and I lost some ducklings both to an unknown issue (narrowed down to niacin deficiency from too much foraging, heat stroke, or mushroom poisoning) and to the evacuation.

Tiny yellow/black fluffballs grew up into truly lovely birds faster than I could imagine. Muscovies are very quiet birds. They make a little hissing or trilling sound depending on sex, fly around some, and congregate in little groups to chat and look at the sky. Often they'd be perching on my deck railing when I looked out in the morning, and even still the youngest little girl will fly up to my railing to hang out.

Thing is, none of the birds I have can live well in the same sex ratio in which they're born. I ended up with very roughly 18 male muscovies to 8 females hatched this year. Once those eggs hatched the fate of most of those males was set. If I wanted to continue keeping muscovies - and I love them and would be very sad to be without them - either I or someone else would have to kill some. When I raised rats I carefully placed all my babies in pet homes. There are not pet homes for male birds. And... I was not going to ship my babies off to be confused and terrified before they were killed.

I had a taste of what was coming in the summer. Lilac had a prolapse: that's where the poop/urine/egg tract (it's all one hole in birds) inverts and there are parts hanging out the body that really should be inside. I hate it when this happens to any animal. There's a really high chance for infection if it's not dealt with quickly and it just hits my creeping horror buttons. We caught her, tried to re-insert the organ, but there was too much damage and things wouldn't line up right. Tucker helped me; we calmed her, held her down, and chopped off her head with an axe. When she had finished bleeding and twitching I plucked her, gutted her, cut her up, and put her in the freezer.

I don't remember if that was before or after I caught everyone and put them in a rigged-up trailer to evacuate them in the face of our wildfires. We drove for hours, then they had to be caught in the trailer and transferred to a small enclosure. The enclosure had a pool and plenty of straw so they were happy there until they had to be shepherded back into the trailer and hauled back.

Work was busy and the birds were still growing so I left well enough alone.

At some point they molted, growing new feathers to keep them warm over winter and it turned out Chocolate II was actually Lilac II.

When snow started to fall in October I realised just how much muscovies forage. Once the ground was covered my feed bill quadrupled. I started going through a full bag of feed a day, which I supplemented with corn to add carbs/heat/fat to help the birds prepare for the winter. When I went away for a week I left my petsitter with a pile of feed bags over a meter high so they wouldn't run out.

The males were starting to come into sexual maturity. They were tusseling over food, but more worryingly they were starting to mate. Open pools of water act as an aphrodesiac for birds so when I filled my kiddie pools every evening mating would start. Because I had double as many males as females, and because they mated on water, the females would be in the pools for a long time with their heads pushed under water over and over. Over-mating can also increase the chance of prolapse. It was time.

Josh came over last weekend. There was a bunch of stuff that needed doing in addition to the birds and we both did all that first: clean the chimney, assemble the snowblower, get straw. On the night before butcher I filled the pools many times so the muscovies could all play their game of diving into the pool, flapping their wings in a shower of sparkling water, and running out and away as fast as they could. They traded dives like kids waiting their turn on a slide. The next morning their feathers were frosted on the tips.

There were more muscovies to butcher than I had time and energy and choosing which ones would go on this first day was difficult. I kept some specifically in to choose among to breed later and some just because I liked them (Chocolate's first 3 boys, Friendly the black muscovy who eats out of my hand, and a gorgeous chocolate drake) and some were just harder to catch so they didn't make this round. We carried them to the large kill cone set up between two aspen trees at the far end of the yard, tucked them in there, and I held their feet while Josh cut off their heads. After the first one ravens began to circle. Some dogs were making a ruckus down the road and Avallu moved from one corner of the property to another to protect us. He didn't complain that the enticing blood smells made his job harder. Thea was locked inside so she wouldn't get her puppy curiosity and enthusiasm in the way.

Some I stroked their heads and I cried a little. Some were businesslike. When the head was cut off blood came in twin streams from the stump of the neck and stained the base of the trees an astonishingly red colour against brown leaves and the little bit of snow on the ground. When the heads landed on the ground they blinked and the beaks opened and closed; the bodies in the cones convulsed a bit and then eventually stilled. They were placed side by side in the snow until it was done.

None of this was easy. Not easy, either, was the following ten hours of wrestling with scalding and plucking and gutting and finally letting the carcasses freeze outside once they were gutted.

It won't be easy to cut up the carcasses, to slide breasts into the sous vide and then sear them, to confit or render down the bodies for stock. My feelings are sadness and some sort of resigned awe, or perhaps awe-struck resignation. Every human is made out of dead things: dead animals and dead plants that grew out of dead animals at some point in our past. That's a fundamental truth. There is meaning in putting my hand on the taut reality of that truth and feeling it thrum.

But honestly, more than anything, I love my animals. They are a self-contained society of alien beauty and behaviours. They enrich the world by their presence. If I am going to allow them to breed, if I am going to let their generations progress into the future with each one slightly more suited to my land as I gently steer their evolution, then some will also need to die. My choice is to be the person who kills them.

And so I have.